Dear University, do you DM?

Thirteen years ago, one ambitious man thought he could change the way we communicate forever. He thought he could go up against the big bosses of technology make waves. Most people could not see his vision or share his unwavering belief that the way we communicate was going to change in a big way, but today Mark Zuckerberg is at the helm of one of the biggest media companies known to man: Facebook.

Who could have predicted that Facebook would have impacted the world in the manner it did? Who could have imagine how much it shifted communications between corporate entities and consumers, between peers? Instant messaging has been around since the days of ICQ, but businesses did not jump on the bandwagon until ten years later, when Facebook bridged the gaps between brands and people. In fairness, Twitter also had a part to play in this communication shift as well, making celebrities and bigger corporate brands more accessible and relatable, and spearheading a shift in public relations and journalism like nothing else ever has in history.

Twitter gave the public an easily accessible avenue for direct communications from consumers to be heard on a public platform, and businesses responded by providing swift support through their business Twitter accounts, and thus begun the dance between brand and buyer. Facebook jumped into the game headfirst, and gave businesses and opportunity to combine work and play on one platform, improving usability with company pages, then providing an advertising platform that would cripple traditional advertising outlets. This rippled throughout all industries and eventually education joined the masses too, providing an avenue to communicate via social media. However, sharing memes didn’t make social media massively beneficial for corporate level communication; it was direct messaging.

The benefits of a conversation via social media direct messaging are vast, but the main one is really convenience. While marketers will talk about the importance of being where the consumers are, convenience is the name of the game when it comes to speaking one-on-one. As consumer behaviour changes, universities, like all organisations, must adapt or risk becoming irrelevant or outdated.

Click4Assistance has answered the call by developing a sleek integration with multiple social media instant messaging platforms, so you never miss a message, and increases efficiency as it’s on the same dashboard as all your digital communication with your students and prospective students. This seamless social media integration allows you to receive messages from your live chat on your website, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, all from one dashboard on your desktop. Your university’s administrative staff will benefit from detailed reports, showing how your students, current and prospective, are communicating with you.

Since Click4Assistance also has integration with your CRM, customer relationship manager, or in your university’s case it may be your student relationship manager, your administrative team or customer service agents will be able to link these conversations with student records, giving you a more accurate communication history.

Social media instant messaging and live chat are very important facets of communication in today’s digital world. While they are accessible 24 hours a day, they provide a method of communication that may be more appealing to students, and also more inclusive to those who may have difficulties with communicating by telephone or in person. The convenience of these forms of communication ensures that your students are more likely to use them, as they use them daily with friends and family, and will reduce the volume of calls made to your office line. Administrative teams experience an increase in productivity as they will be able to communicate with three or more students at a time with a chat box for website or instant messaging system, as opposed to only one at a time over the phone.

The always-on, always-open, 24/7 lifestyle of today can prove to be expensive when you have to employ chat agents to manage the graveyard shifts, or the shifts that are outside of normal office hours. Imagine the administrative work involved in coordinating and scheduling agents, and making amendments when you have someone calling in sick, or going on holiday. It sounds like more work than it needs to be, but that’s the direction the world is headed into: 24 hour, round the clock service.

This is where artificial intelligence can step in. Not only does an AI chatbot not get ill, it also doesn’t need to go on annual leave, or sleep, or have any human resource complaints at all. In fact, we’d wager they would be an excellent addition to your team, providing instant engagement with an unlimited number of people on your website at any time of the day, assisting them with website navigation and also answering basic questions that don’t always need human intervention. This further increases the productivity of your own administrative staff, maximising their time for other tasks within your university.

The way we interact with technology has changed, and universities, like every other business and organisation out there, needs to move with the waves of technology progression. If you’re interested in deploying Click4Assistance, the UK’s premier GDPR compliant live chat software solution, to increase your universities’ productivity for 2020, give us a call on 08451235871 or send an email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk and one of our team experts will be with you right away.